General description

Aim of projects in this area is to develop games where people interact with autonomous robots by using the WII Remote, the main controller of the Nintendo WII console. The area is coordinated by Andrea Bonarini, and belongs to the Robogames activities.

Since WII Remote (shortly: WIIMote) has onboard a 3-axis accelerometer, and infrared camera, a speaker, 4 leds, a vibration system and many buttons, it could be used as a human-computer interface in many robotic applications. This link is about some of the things that can be done with a WIIMote. Check Johnny Lee on Youtube for more...

Active Projects

Finished Projects

RoboWII 1.0

The first robot

Antonio Bianchi and Ben Chen developed a game system (RoboWII1.0) where the human player has to try to point a led target on the robot with the infrared camera of the WIIMote, while the robot tries to get a target position and at the same time to avoid to be caught.

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Wii Remote controller

They have used a robot originally used in Robocup, with a two-wheels differential kinematics.
RoboWII has been developed in Linux, using C++. The communication between computer and WIIMote is done using the library Wiiuse. Moreover, some packages developed at Politecnico di Milano within the MRT project (Modular Robotic Toolkit) have been used:

DCDT, for message exchange among the components of RoboWII

Mr. Brian, to program fuzzy logic behaviors

The localization software was originally developed within the LURCH project, and is able to localize the robot w.r.t. a set of printed markers placed on the ceiling over the playground. This software uses the ArtToolkitPlus libraries.

RunBot

Robowii Video

RoboWII2.0. First test of the game at Open Day on April 4th, 2009 with a novice user. Some improvements are needed to reduce fear and increase understandability of the game. Comments coming from video analysis on the discussion page.

RoboWII 2.0. The robot and the new led interface to improve the playability of the game.
The green led indicates when the robot is pointed by the WIIMote. The red leds indicate the time of charge, when they are all lit it's possible to hit the robot.